Collaborative environments

Researchers often need to use workflows that have been developed by other experts in their field to handle specific parts of their work. Sooner or later they find that they want to use workflows from multiple sources that are written in different languages. Enacting multi-lingual workflows (or meta workflows) has been pioneered in a group of European projects. The next step is to be able to change them when they do not do exactly what you want. But that is not easy if you need to learn a different editor for each workflow language.

Researchers often need to use workflows that have been developed by other experts in their field to handle specific parts of their work. Sooner or later they find that they want to use workflows from multiple sources that are written in different languages. Enacting multi-lingual workflows (or meta workflows) has been pioneered in a group of European projects. The next step is to be able to change them when they don’t do exactly what you want. But that is not easy if you need to learn a different editor for each workflow language.

Large-scale distributed workflow systems for science are nowadays expected to operate in a consistent, predictable way as well as to promote collaboration between researchers or within groups in a unified way. In this talk we will discuss the VERCE Information Registry, which is designed to provide a consistent view of the VERCE ecosystem for seismology along with related architectural requirements, assumptions and interactions with other components.

One of the main objectives of the VERCE project (Virtual Earthquake and Seismology Research Community in Europe) is to provide scientists with a unified, Europe-wide, computing environment able to support data-intensive scientific computation. This talk will be mainly about our approach to designing and building this infrastructure. More specifically, I will present the current computing environment, the rationale for designing our solutions around the workflow paradigm as well as the basic components of the architecture and their interactions.

Diversity, in every dimension, is a key attribute of today’s data bonanza. Our research takes a holistic view, embracing this diversity and the consequent intricate interactions between users and systems. We created the Dispel data-streaming language to describe complex computation patterns at high levels of abstraction, while providing meta-information for optimisation. Provenance and contextual information must be harnessed to achieve autonomous execution, data placement, energy efficiency and reliability.

A discussion of the SHIWA and ER-flow projects, based on the meeting held with ER-flow project members on Friday 18th January 2013 at the University of Westminster, London.

The SHIWA project was a 3-year EU-funded project that finished in August 2012. Its aim was to develop workflow interoperability technologies, more specifically, to enable e-scientists to run heterogeneous workflows (i.e. workflows created by different workflow systems), separately or combined, from a single platform, and on different distributed computing infrastructures.

Open Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have growing popularity and are predicted to have many applications in near future, as large scale distributed systems such as clouds become more widespread. However, A major practical limitation to open MAS is security.

1. A brief intro into what gene expression annotation is, how it can be captured (using example of Eurexpress.org project); How collected annotation data corpora can be used for analysis and auto-annotation.
2. Introduce virtual fly brain (VFB) project.
3. Describe the modes of collecting annotation in the scope of VFB, refer to the problem of data verification.
4. Introduce the proposed social media based approach to data verification and further data analysis.

OpenKnowledge is a system which allows peers on an arbitrarily large peer-to-peer network to interact productively with one another without any global agreements or pre-run-time knowledge of who to interact with or how interactions will proceed. Any kind of service (including those involving human/environment interaction) can become a peer or else we provide facilities for users to easily create their own peer, by sharing existing code or writing their own.

The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique – Institut National des Sciences de l’Univers (CNRS-INSU) is looking for a new R&D Scientific Software Research Engineer to assist in the VERCE project (http://www.verce.eu/). Details attached, as well as available from the VERCE website.

The 10-years of the e-Science programme and many earlier years of e-Science have shown the critical importance of digital communication in data-intensive research and in collaboration to bring sufficient expertise to bear on challenges. A review of the 10 years of the e-Science programme shows that the significant positive outcomes are often years after the initial work, even though that led to major breakthroughs and achievements.